Then, as she had done on the night of the murder, she paused to stare out of the window to collect her thoughts. Not far away, she could see the lights of the squash courts building site. But everything else was in darkness. Below her was the roof of the kitchen area, with its sturdy iron railings and its tubs of miniature trees. And suddenly, Lindsay knew what her mind had been stubbornly hiding from her for the past six days.

16

There were two of them sharing the cell. At least being on remand meant they had certain privileges. For a start, Paddy had books to read and her own clothes to wear. Either Gillian Markham or her clerk visited daily, on Cordelia’s instructions, bringing fresh reading supplies, tempting food, and the half bottle of wine that Home Office regulations allow remand prisoners. But although these small luxuries made life a little more tolerable, it was just as hard for Paddy to submit to the indignities of prison life as it was for every other woman on the wing. Her plight had not really sunk in while she had been in police custody. The remand hearing in the magistrates’ court had seemed unreal. But when she had arrived at the remand center, she had started to feel like a condemned animal arriving at the abbatoir. Nevertheless, the strip search, degrading in its intimacy, had humiliated but not broken her. What prison food she had eaten had only disgusted her.

What was pushing her perilously close to breaking point was the isolation. Her cell-mate, who was on remand for receiving stolen goods, was pleasant enough to her. But there was no real point of contact between them. Marion was understandably obsessed by the problems facing her three young children and her unemployed live-in boyfriend. Despite that, she still found it impossible to understand how Paddy could exist happily without a steady man and a family. That inability undermined Paddy even further, making her question why she had never been able to settle for any of the men who had been part of her life for varying lengths of time. But at least Marion was not hostile, unlike many of the other women on the wing, who seemed to take positive pleasure in seeing a middle-class woman facing the same degradation they endured.